Tokihiro Sato Works | Bio | Press | Exhibition Views
Japanese, b. 1957
Lives and works in Tokyo, Japan
Tokihiro Sato is widely recognized as one of Japan’s most accomplished and well respected artists working in the photographic medium. Originally trained as a sculptor, he turned to photography in the late 1980s to explore his ideas with regard to light and space. His fascination with temporality is directly seen in his “breath graphs” or “photo respiration,” where tiny points of light or illuminated lines record his movements through space. Using an 8 x 10-inch camera fitted with a darkening filter, Sato’s lengthy exposures – lasting from one to three hours – provide the opportunity for him to occupy the landscape. When shooting in daylight, he flashes a mirror at the sun, reflecting its light into the camera lens. For nocturnal or interior views he “draws” with a small flashlight. The result¬ing photographs exquisitely depict detailed scenes punctu¬ated by tiny pinpoints of light that track Sato’s movement, but not his physical form.
Tokihiro Sato was born in 1957 in Sakata, Yamagata Pre¬fecture, in northern Honshu, Japan. He earned degrees in Sculpture from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, where he now works as a professor. His work is held in nu¬merous public and private collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Cleveland Museum of Art and Hara Museum of Art, Tokyo. Over the past decade, his work has been showcased in solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Cleveland Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago and Frist Center for Visual Arts in Nashville.